The National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START), a Department of Homeland Security Center of Excellence housed at the University of Maryland, offers a course looking at the who, what and how of Terrorism Studies, by introducing students to cutting-edge research from the social and behavioral sciences and the experts investigating these topics.
The course will begin with a unit looking at widely held myths about terrorism and utilizing empirical data to discuss the realities of broad trends and patterns in terrorist attacks over time. The course will then review the psychological factors at play in individual radicalization and recruitment into terrorism, followed by an analysis of terrorist group dynamics. The course will next look at terrorist group operations, including their attacks and some of the supporting behaviors that allow them to carry out attacks, including use of media, financing, recruitment, and training. The course will conclude by looking at the factors that drive terrorist group persistence or endurance versus terrorist group desistance, and will bring the varied course concepts together through a detailed look at the case of Al-Qa’ida.
Throughout the course, students will have the opportunity to study and work with the University of Maryland’s Global Terrorism Database (GTD), the largest database of terrorist incidents in the world, learning its capabilities and developing basic skills in searching and displaying terrorism data.

Enseigné par

Dr. Gary LaFree

Director

Bill Braniff

Executive Director

Kate Izsak

Education Director

Joyce Rasing

Transcription

Hi, my name is Bill Braniff. In the last section, you heard Gary LeFree talk about some of the myths associated with terrorism, which suggests that there must be some challenges in understanding the topic. So in this lecture, we're going to talk a little bit more explicitly about the challenges associated with studying terrorism. I often joke that in my professional life, I have the unique pleasure of standing up in front of rooms full of strangers and talking about religion, politics, and violence at the same time, the three very topics that you're not supposed to discuss in polite company. Terrorism is a highly emotive topic. And the first challenge is just getting past the emotions that it evokes. But even after you get past that challenge, there are some others. First, while terrorism is an ancient phenomenon, the social-scientific study of terrorism is actually a fairly new, a recent phenomenon. And while we've made great strides to scientifically understand terrorism and terrorist behaviors in the last decade, and we have a great body of literature from historians to draw upon, which are essential to understanding terrorist movements over time, the scientific study is fairly immature. And that provides us with some challenges, because we don't have sort of a scientific foundation to draw upon as we do in other more developed academic discourses. Of course, the most commonly cited issue with terrorism studies is the fact that terrorism doesn't have one definition. And we'll discuss this in the next lecture. But if we can't agree on a definition, or if there are multiple definitions at play, which is often the case between governments or even between different agencies within the same government, then we'll often be talking past one another. This means we're unable to convey really sophisticated and nuanced ideas at best, or at worst, we wind up in a screaming match because we're clearly not seeing eye to eye. As a general rule, there's a lack of objective data with respect to terrorism. And this is for a few reasons to include, but not limited to the definitional one that I just mentioned. Terrorism is typically a clandestine activity. The perpetrators don't share their secrets willingly. And the information that they do share is factually dubious propaganda. It's information that is skewed in order to put their violence or behaviors in the most positive light. Furthermore when governments or businesses are targeted by terrorist organizations or individuals, they're oftentimes not very interested in disseminating the facts either, because they feel that it might expose either a real vulnerability or a perceived vulnerability, or it might just validate or provide some sort of confirmation for the grievance that the terrorist organization is fighting for. So in the absence of objective data, the void is oftentimes filled by anecdote or really emotional responses and agenda driven responses. Terrorism is a tactic that perpetrators use to draw attention to emotional and divisive issues and to polarize people into one or other side of a given debate. Terrorism is often used to rip at the social fabric between segments of a population or to rip at the social contract between the government and its constituency. It's like a hammer that drives in wedge issues between these groups. Conversations therefore often wind up being about the rightness or the wrongness of the cause the terrorist organization is claiming to be fighting for, their stated beliefs or goals, as opposed to their actual behaviors. You've undoubtedly heard the phrase that one man's freedom fighter is another man's terrorist. To say it another way, terrorists often claim to be fighting for the very same beliefs or very similar beliefs that other law-abiding citizens, activists might also believe in or actively promote. It's not the stated world view that makes someone a terrorist, not the grievance, which they say they're fighting against, or the goal that they're fighting for. Instead, it's their reliance on illegal violence to advance those beliefs that makes somebody a terrorist. But many conversations never get beyond the normative discussions about the rightness or wrongness of the cause. And so the discussions never actually get to talking about the terrorist behavior itself. And finally, terrorism doesn't fit neatly within any one academic discipline. Terrorism is a criminal behavior and so criminology helps us understand terrorism to some degree. But because the underlying motivations are so different between terrorist actors and criminal actors, who oftentimes have a profit motive, criminology doesn't answer all of our questions. Similarly with political science, terrorism is inherently a political phenomenon. And yet, political science is not necessarily geared towards this sort of extremist element of the political spectrum. Terrorism is interest group activity on steroids, right? And so, not all of political theory helps us understand terrorism although much of it does. Sociology helps us understand the relationship between terrorist organizations, broader movements, and how they both relate to society. But we of course need things like psychology to understand individual motivations and individual behavior. No one flavor of academic theory therefore gives us a holistic understanding of terrorism. No one methodology is robust enough to describe this really complex human phenomenon. So as a result, we have to use multiple lenses, if we're to see terrorism clearly. And we'll endeavor to do that in this course.